Curator Chat

We Ask Leading Museum Curators About What’s Going On In Their World

What event (gallery show, museum exhibit, etc.) in the next few months are you looking forward to, and why?
I will be retiring on April 1, 2022, after 26-plus years here at The Westmoreland. I look forward to all of the exhibitions that we have scheduled now into early January 2025. I don’t have a particular gallery or museum show in mind; I will just enjoy having the time and opportunity to travel to see exhibitions in New York and elsewhere in the next years.

What are you reading?
I just finished reading Richard Russo’s Nobody’s Fool. I had read Everybody’s Fool several months ago and felt I missed a great deal of the story by reading this first. I could relate to his small town and characters having grown up in a small town in Western New York.

Interesting exhibit, gallery opening or work of art you’ve seen recently.
I just toured the exhibition Gatecrashers: The Rise of the Self-Taught Artist in America at the High Museum of Art. A beautifully organized exhibition by Katherine Jentleson of an important group of artists to rediscover and newly discover. I also recently toured the reinstallation of the Early American Galleries at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. A stunning thematic installation of incredible objects that address important issues that have been omitted in previous iterations.

What are you researching at the moment?
I am not researching anything specific at the moment. In 2020, I completed a chapter on Doris Lee’s commercial art for the catalog Simple Pleasures: The Art of Doris Lee that accompanies the exhibition of the same name on view here through January 9. The exhibition will travel to three venues: Figge Art Museum, Vero Beach Museum of Art and Dixon Gallery & Gardens. In 2021, I contributed a chapter on “Coal Extraction in Pennsylvania” for the catalog Landscapes of Extraction that accompanies the exhibition Landscapes of Extraction: The Art of Mining in the American West at the Phoenix Art Museum.

What is your dream exhibit to curate? Or see someone else curate?
Since I came to The Westmoreland, I have always wanted to organize an exhibition of artist couples, but we never had the opportunity. —